haiku. poetry.

what I read, what I didn’t

Chapter One.

The doctor’s habit is to hold his hand in front of his face when he’s delivering bad news. He looks like he’s about to cough but he’s about to tell you that he saw a shadow in your lungs. “That’s a great metaphor,” you don’t say. You don’t say,“Wow, and then what happened?” He’s not that kind of doctor. You probably need a new doctor, one with a literary sensibility, the hell with how he did in med school. You take notes in your private shorthand while wondering what part of town they keep those doctors in.

and out of nowhere it dawns on you that blossoms are fruit

Chapter Two.

The Man Who’s Sometimes There asks you if you need anything. This is a signal he’s about to not be there for a while. He needs something to bring back with him when he returns. “Something to read,” you tell him. The Man looks worried. He doesn’t understand what you like to read. You can’t blame him, you don’t really understand either. Now that you think of it, you don’t even want anything to read. Reading makes you feel like throwing up. You tell him to bring pudding, because he loves pudding. Then you lie on the couch for six hours not reading. It’s the only thing you can think of to do.

all summer all the voices on the radio

Chapter Three.

Each Thursday from two to five, while tethered to the most insidiously comfortable chair in the world, you spend way too long wondering things: whether the cactus in the waiting room is real, whether your brain will survive being poisoned, whether the nurse with the blue fingernails would ever be your friend. Is there some kind of professional taboo against that? What does the nurse with the blue fingernails do with her friends? You suspect it’s something lighthearted and wonder whether you could ever hack that. You go to sleep and wonder things in your dreams, things too vague and terrifying and beautiful to put into words, and when you wake up the nurse with the blue fingernails is laughing at you. Or no, wait, she’s just laughing at something the other nurse said, but it’s too late, you kind of hate the blue-fingernailed nurse now. Well, it was nice while it lasted.

a sharp distinction between apples and alone

Chapter Four.

The new doctor, who by now is the old doctor, asks you if you saw that new Haruki Murakami book that’s more pictures than words. The new doctor’s got you wrapped around his little finger. That’s agreat metaphor, you don’t tell yourself. You only ever read anymore to have something to talk about with the new doctor. You say something about Haruki Murakami that only makes sense to somebody with a poisoned brain and the new doctor nods the way he nods when you’re being crazy. I’m not sure, he says, that it was a very successful experiment. He looks at the computer where he stores everything he knows about you and sighs, and frowns, and opens his mouth to speak again. Opens his mouth and says some words, but words are just words to you now. What’s real out in the waiting room? What will someone bring you next?